Embodiments of the present invention relate to key searches and, more specifically, to building and using an atomic key with partial key searching capability.
A data repository, such as a database, may maintain numerous data objects. A user or application may wish to search those data objects efficiently. Conventionally, the data objects may be indexed based on a property acting as a primary key, or based on a combination of properties. The exact value indexed would need to be used when searching. Thus, when an index is based on a combination of properties, all of the properties in that combination would need to be used to effectively search the data repository for matching objects. As a result, many such data repositories store multiple indexes for each object, where each index represents some combination of properties, to enable efficient searching across the indexes.